


never go without again

by casualbird



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Character Study, Fluff, Gay, M/M, Morning Cuddles, Post-Canon, mild black eagles route spoilers, no editing we die like men, no plot details
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-09
Updated: 2019-08-09
Packaged: 2020-08-13 11:21:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20173417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/casualbird/pseuds/casualbird
Summary: “I was up,” he confides, “thinking about you.”Byleth cocks his head.Oh? Do tell.“I was thinking about when I came to know that I loved you.” He keeps smiling, offers, for the moment, no more.





	never go without again

**Author's Note:**

  * For [all u kids in the discord](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=all+u+kids+in+the+discord).

Byleth has no idea how he used to do it. With Linhardt finally there with him, loose-limbed and warm, their bodies overlapping in the too-small bed, he knows he’ll never be able to sleep alone again.

Two weeks, it’s been, and he’s already spoiled for life. Byleth can’t help his little crescent-moon smile, can’t help but nuzzle his head deeper into the curve of Linhardt’s neck. He smells like lavender, like the splattered ink that always stains his arms. The brisk spring scent of white magic, too, a little. It’s another thing Byleth had never known, another thing he’d never want to be without.

Despite himself, despite the drowsy silence of the room, Byleth laughs. Just a little, under his breath.

He’s not sure why. Maybe there are just so many new things that he can’t contain them all.

“Something funny?” Linhardt’s words are mumbled, muffled where his face is buried in the pillow. (Just the one pillow, on Byleth’s bed, and Lin had claimed it from their first nap. Byleth had always been a stern man, but he couldn’t have brought himself to mind if he’d wanted to.)

Byleth half-starts. Usually--they have a _usually_ now, for this-- Linhardt isn’t awake by this time. Usually, he wakes when Byleth tries to get up, clinging and whining and making sluggish threats.

“No,” says Byleth, after a second. And then, brow creasing, “did you have trouble sleeping?”

Linhardt shakes his head, which gives Byleth a generous faceful of his hair. He really does laugh, then, dragging his hand from its place at Lin’s waist to get it out of his eyes.

“Sorry,” says Lin, and shifts to face him. It’s an awkward maneuver in a bed this small, for such a long-limbed man. The bedframe protests, and Byleth, too, when he gets a stray knee in his diaphragm.

It is worth it, though, for the way Linhardt presses to his chest, pulls him close with one leg hooked around his. Byleth, emboldened by the closeness, by the bleariness and contentment in his eyes, slips one hand up the back of Lin’s sleep shirt. His eyes narrow at that, lip quirking, but it’s not to start anything. Just to lay his palm, his spread fingers over the furrows of Linhardt’s ribs, to feel him breathe.

For a moment, they lay like that. Lin’s heartbeat is slow, his skin soft. It is a world apart from the way they would touch during the war-- arms grasped quickly, bodies crashing as Byleth tore Linhardt from the line of fire; Linhardt’s shaking cold-sweat palms jammed against Byleth’s back to heal.

Byleth knows that once the Empire steadies its stance over Fódlan, it will come to that again. He will work out how to live with it sometime between then and now. Hopefully.

His face must fall, because Linhardt kisses him. Gently, just the brush of chapped lips slightly parted. He pulls back, smiles that serene little smile of his-- the one he gets when he talks about fishing, books he’s read for pleasure. The kind that does not hope but _knows_ that life is still good, that eventually all will be well.

“I was up,” he confides, “thinking about you.”

Byleth cocks his head. _Oh? Do tell._

“I was thinking about when I came to know that I loved you.” He keeps smiling, offers, for the moment, no more.

A raised eyebrow gets a tiny raindrop laugh from him, presses him on.

“I just... I really tripped and fell for you when I was sixteen. You probably don’t want to hear that, given that you were my professor, but... well, it’s the truth. I thought you were gorgeous, I thought you were kind, and you were-- you were such an _enigma,_ I couldn’t get enough of it, I wanted to know everything. Dorothea called it puppy love, and it would irk me so terribly because I’d never felt so enthusiastic about a person before, but she was right. All that time I thought I was head over heels for you and I completely failed to account for the thing that actually made-- makes you so precious to me. You never... tried to make me into something I wasn’t. I was never going to be the eager soldier, that much was for certain.”

He sighs.

“I don’t think I could have stomached the war if you hadn’t let me choose my own path. If I’d had to force myself... I wouldn’t have made it. I would have left, or--”

Another sigh, and his face falls into Byleth’s shoulder. An unpleasant thought. Byleth shifts him closer, starts a slow back-and-forth brush of his hand over Linhardt’s bare back.

He tips his head up, smile faltering, apologetic. Byleth kisses it. More deeply this time, and longer, but the idea is to soothe him, to lead him back from this place of old aches.

“And when you came back, when I knew I was your equal, when you weren’t _charged_ with me anymore but you still wanted to spend time with me, still respected me for the person I am... Ugh, I knew what it meant to be gone on you then.”

“And it didn’t help,” he muses, coming up to meet Byleth’s eye, “that you’re just _transfixing_ to look at.”

He pauses for a moment. “I hope that that’s alright. I mean-- like I said, it’s the truth, but it must be... awkward, to know the way I used to feel.”

A shake of the head-- gentle, slow. “You’re alright,” Byleth murmurs, and Linhardt lets out all his breath, darts forth to kiss his beloved’s nose.

“Now,” he says, managing to sound crisp through a yawn. “I told you my embarrassing story. And marriage, they say--” he pauses, then, to finagle his arm out from between their chests, make a point of his engagement ring--”is all about communication, so why don’t you give me a little quid pro quo?”

Byleth can’t help but laugh out loud. (It’s a quiet thing, still, rusty-sounding, but fully audible and, in Linhardt’s estimation, _darling._)

“You planned this,” he says, and it is absolutely not a question.

“Nolo contendere,” Linhardt sniffs, snuggling innocently closer to Byleth’s chest.

Byleth sighs, and it is just _replete_ with affection. Lin preens. “I don’t know if I could say exactly, since it was... It was hard for me to know. Not because I don’t feel strongly for you.”

Linhardt gives a little murmur of understanding.

“One of the first times I had tea with you. After I came back.”

“I can never know how much all of you suffered while I was gone, but I know the war was... long. Hard. So many of you were... barely holding it together. But you told me what you wanted to do after the war.”

He stops for a little while, hand still drifting absently across Linhardt’s back. Lin watches the process play out on his face-- he thumbs carefully though his words, stringing them together like beads.

“You never-- you had to work so hard not to let it break you. I know how hard it is on you. Fighting. But you had this belief. With all of the uncertainty, you still believed that you’d be able to live in peace.”

“And I-- I have never. I don’t remember my childhood well. I did mercenary work... for a long time before I came to Garreg Mach. And then the war-- I never thought I would do anything but fight. But when I heard about your dreams and how deeply you still believed in them... I was taken with that. I thought that maybe-- I believe in Edelgard. I believe in her ideals and I’m glad I fought for them. That I will continue to fight for them. But near the end... it’s what you told me about that kept me going. When it all felt meaningless. Too bloody. And at first I thought I could do that... by myself. But somehow I...”

He sighs. Something in him feels split open, like an egg had cracked in his chest, albumen dripping from his mouth. It was the most he’d spoken in... a long time.

“By the time it was over,” he said, voice waning. “I knew that it wasn’t just the peace. The quiet. It was you, too. And-- and so-- that’s it.”

“I feel the same,” says Linhardt, after a silence just long enough for Byleth to wonder if he’d said something wrong. “It’s you.”

Lin lifts his head, catches Byleth by the lips once more. And when he pulls back, Byleth sees his cup overflowing in the slump of his eyelids, the smile that parts to show the edges of teeth. And, may Sothis help him, this is it. This is something he will never be able to go without again.

**Author's Note:**

> i've no idea if i've got the characterization down... but if you've gotten this far, i suppose i must have gotten something right. thank you for reading! i hope that you enjoyed. 
> 
> all feedback is welcome and deeply appreciated.


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